Continuing with our FAQ series, today we answer FAQ #7 about The SEO Bible which has to do with outsourcing or contracting with SMB Consulting after purchasing The SEO Bible. There seems to be a lot of interest in buying the training package to learn organic SEO, but there are quite a few of you that just want to understand some of the details even though you don’t necessarily want to perform all of the tasks.

Q. Does your organization offer any discounts to those purchasing The SEO Bible that don’t necessarily want to do the day-to-day organic search engine optimization tasks?

A. This is obviously a question we receive frequently since we’re addressing it in this series, and it’s a good one because a lot of people fear they’ll purchase a product like The SEO Bible only to realize down the road that they can’t dedicate the time necessary to do the work each week to properly optimize a site. For those that purchase one of the SEO Bible training packages, we’re offering a 25% discount on any future marketing services contracted through SMB Consulting. Since our organization does so much more than just SEO, this could prove to be a major benefit to you or your organization as things progress. At least that is our intention.

One caveat: if someone purchases The SEO Bible and requests a refund, they will also forfeit any future discount offers. As stated in a previous FAQ posting, we don’t anticipate many refund requests, but we also realize it is impossible to please everyone completely so there will be some that simply are not a “good fit” for the training package and/or our organization.

As we continue to pour over your e-mail questions, we’re attempting to outline the most frequently asked to answer them before the planned release of The SEO Bible training package in January.

 Q. Since most SEO books are outdated by the time they are released, how do you plan to keep The SEO Bible relevant? 

A. Through free lifetime updates, The SEO Bible will be a resource that stays on top of the SEO industry and won’t become outdated.  You’ll be notified via e-mail when updates are available, and you’ll be supplied a link to download your updated copy. 

Keep the questions coming!  We aim to please and will continue to answer your most asked questions here on the blog. If something is on your mind, lob us an e-mail at questions@the-seo-bible.com. 

Many potential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) clients come to me stating they don’t have the financial resources to contract my firm for services yet they’d like to get started with the promotion of their site within the search engine sphere. Below I’ve attempted to outline the first steps I might take if I had a new website to promote from the ground up.

Promote Your Site Everywhere
Offline optimization is just as important as it is online as you’re simply trying to generate interest in your business or website, right? Consider promoting your website offline just as you would your business. Nobody will know about your site unless you tell them, but you don’t want to be a hound about it either so be subtle. The traffic you generate may result in a huge sale that puts your business on the map.

Write and Submit Articles about Your Business or Industry
Promoting your business via articles about your industry or the business itself are a great way to build awareness without being over the top or in someone’s face. The more articles you write and submit to online e-zines or article directories, the more your name circulates. Think about it, when you read an informative article that helps you solve a problem, perform a task better, or recaps an event, your guard isn’t as high as it is when you come across an all out advertisement is it?

Be sure to include a byline at the end containing a link to your site along with brief information about you and your company. This will not only generate awareness, it will also help your search engine optimization campaign by building “natural” links back to your website as the article circulates the online community.

Involve Yourself in the Blogosphere
Blogs are a great way to show a more human side to a company, and their popularity continues to increase. My advice is to start a blog about your company, industry, or niche that is a sub-domain off of your main website. A sub-domain may look like this: subdomain.domain.com to where your blog may utilize a scheme similar to blog.yourdomain.com. This is a great way to build unique content for your domain while also helping your customers or clients get to know the human side of your business. There are several free blog generators out there that will even host your blog for free, and two of the more popular ones can be found at blogger.com or wordpress.com.

If starting your own blog is too tall a task, visit others’ blogs related to your industry and join in the conversation by posting comments and interacting with the blog owner. Many blog comments are indexed by the name you enter in the name field of the comment form so you can build links to your site this way. One note of caution: there is a lot of debate whether no-follow links such as the ones on most blogs provide any search optimization value, and I have found that they do provided the blog itself ranks well and has a large following.

Submit Your Site to Directories
Directory submissions are an integral part of basic SEO, and directory listings help to form a foundation of links pointing to your site that generally won’t go anywhere unless the directory disappears or is shutdown for some reason. Many directories such as DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory feed search engine results and carry a lot of “weight” with major search engines such as Google, MSN/Live, and Yahoo!

There are hundreds of free directories out there, and my recommendation is to subcontract this service out to an inexpensive submission service (do a search for “directory submission service”). For as little as $30, you can have your website submitted to hundreds of directories in little time. Manually doing this could take countless hours, and it’s very tedious work. One note of caution: directories don’t get indexed overnight. It will take some time for your site to get “credit” for being listed in a lot of the online directories.

Engage in a Free PR Campaign
While print media isn’t as popular as it once was, people still read newspapers, trade journals, and magazines. Local newspapers are always looking for interesting stories on local people to write about in order to increase their readership. Magazines are a bit different in that your story needs to be very compelling and unique in some fashion, but your website and business can get a big jolt if you can land a story in a print publication of some sort. One word of caution: don’t go shooting for the New York Times or Inc. Magazine right out of the chute unless you’re truly prepared to handle a huge influx of site visits, e-mails, phone calls, and unrelated requests about your business.

Basic SEO isn’t that difficult if you think about it in a common sense manner. Promoting your site online is very similar to how you’d promote your business offline—it’s all about positive exposure. Being heavily involved online as well as off is a solid strategy to building awareness for your business and its website.

ThomasNet and Google state that “83% of today’s buyers use search engines for sourcing new products and services.”  With nearly 8 billion searches performed each month (Source: Nielsen/NetRatings), search engine optimization can be an extremely powerful marketing tool to leverage in generating highly targeted and qualified leads for your business through your website. 

 9 of every 10 search users click on a result within the first three pages of search results (Source: iProspect, “Search Engine User Behavior Study,” April 2006). Placing a billboard in the desert doesn’t make much sense, but having a website that isn’t consistently visible in the upper rankings of search engine results pages doesn’t do a whole lot of good either.  In order to achieve success, here are five strategic areas to consider to better your odds of reaching your online marketing objectives. 

Focus on Business Goals

What is your business looking to achieve over the next year to three years, and how could internet marketing contribute to reaching those objectives?  The reason to ask this question is a lot of businesses dive into SEO with a goal of ranking well for a certain keyword or phrase without considering the impact on their organization.  Assuming you are successful with your SEO campaign, how is your business going to handle a large influx of potential leads?  What happens if people begin to order products and services online at a much higher clip?  Are your employees prepared for this, and are your technical resources capable of handling loads of traffic? 

SEO is a Marketing Ploy

There are businesses out there that will scrap their existing marketing campaigns in favor of marketing exclusively online.  While SEO can provide a solid ROI, it’s not a magic bullet.  It’s merely another marketing ploy that can provide qualified leads—don’t lose sight of that as your business sets out to attract more of its desired target audience.  If anything, look at what works well today and continue with those efforts while implementing SEO instead of something ineffective.   

Generate Quality Content

One of the tenets of organic search engine optimization is content generation.  You want to produce quality that will separate your from your competitors and help your audience learn more about your industry.  If you produce enough quality information that helps your audience, you’ll be looked upon as the go-to resource or authority. 

Test Everything

When implementing a marketing campaign of any sort, testing variables should be incorporated throughout so that the campaign can be measured.  Ranking better in a search engine result page isn’t an effective measurement by itself.  It’s nice to rank well, but how many more eyeballs dos that ranking generate for your website, and what are those extra eyeballs doing once they visit your site?  Are they doing what you want them to, or are they following a pattern that suggests change?  If you don’t test and measure, you won’t have any way to answer the key visitor behavioral questions to propel your business forward. 

Strong Call to Action

At the beginning of any marketing campaign, there should be some set of actions you want your desired target audience to do once they interact with your organization.  Make those actions crystal clear.  Getting a flood of visitors to discover your site is interesting to a small degree, but what good does it do you if they don’t do anything once they visit?  Having a strong call to action that you test and monitor will increase your ROI over the long haul. 

While search engine optimization can be very cost effective and produce a nice marketing ROI if handled properly, it requires a strong strategic understanding of the underlying business and the potential prospects visiting your website.  Following the tips outlined above can help guide you to the promised land with your online marketing efforts.